A key argument of Dixon et al. in the target article is that prejudice reduction through intergroup contact and collective action work in opposite ways. We argue for a complementary approach focusing on extreme emotions to understand why people turn to non-normative collective action and to understand when and under what conditions extreme emotions may influence positive effects of contact on reconciliation.

Many social situations require a mental model of the knowledge, beliefs, goals, and intentions of others: a Theory of Mind (ToM). If a person can reason about other people’s beliefs about his own beliefs or intentions, he is demonstrating second-order ToM reasoning. A standard task to test second-order ToM reasoning is the second-order false belief task. A different approach to investigating ToM reasoning is through its application in a strategic game. Another task that is believed to involve the application of (...) second-order ToM is the comprehension of sentences that the hearer can only understand by considering the speaker’s alternatives. In this study we tested 40 children between 8 and 10 years old and 27 adult controls on (adaptations of) the three tasks mentioned above: the false belief task, a strategic game, and a sentence comprehension task. The results show interesting differences between adults and children, between the three tasks, and between this study and previous research. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has firmly established the similarities between Arendt and Foucault, in particular with regard to the dangers of late-modern social processes. Yet, few have compared their accounts of resistance. This paper argues that although Foucault offers the more comprehensive account, it omits the encounter with the other as unique and unfathomable, which is central to Arendt’s. This omission is particularly striking given the authors’ shared belief that the danger of ‘the social’ and ‘governmentality’ lies in atomizing individuals and barring (...) the development of a singular style of being, and their allusion to friendship and solidarity as sites of resistance. Drawing on Arendt, I show how Foucault restricts his thematization of solidarity and friendship to a reflexive praxis of the subject on her own limits, and argue instead for the relational dimension of resistance. I start by reconstructing their converging analysis of biological racism. I then continue with a discussion of resistance in Arendt, which she develops in response to the Shoah. More specifically, she provides a concept of solidarity and friendship that I draw on to extend Foucault’s analysis of the transnational solidarity among the governed in fighting for their rights vis-à-vis their governments; and of friendship in the context of his interrogation of the LGBT-movement. (shrink)

Approaching Simone de Beauvoir’s feminism and social commentary as a resource to understand our current crises, Beauvoir and Politics: A Toolkit brings together established and emerging scholars to apply her insights to gender studies, political philosophy, decolonisation, intellectual history, age theory, and critical phenomenology. The essays in this collection start from key concepts in Beauvoir’s oeuvre and relate them to contemporary debates, asking how her notion of ambiguity speaks to lived experiences that have been highly politicized in recent years, such (...) as pregnancy, old age, sexual violence, and the exposure of black and brown bodies to police violence; how myths inform our notions of collective, national identities, as well as notions of masculinity and femininity; and how she provides conceptual tools that help to theorize the various political strategies that are used to challenge gendered and racialized systems of oppression. These and other issues are central to this critical appraisal of Beauvoir’s legacy, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of her thought as it diagnoses the present and looks toward change for a better future. This book will be of great interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students looking to engage with the political content of Simone de Beauvoir’s work and the timely application of her ideas. (shrink)

Approaching Simone de Beauvoir's feminism and social commentary as a toolkit to understand our current crises, Simone de Beauvoir: Toolkit for the 21st Century brings together established and emerging scholars to apply her insights to gender studies, political philosophy, decolonisation, intellectual history, age theory, and critical phenomenology. The essays in this collection start from key concepts in Beauvoir's oeuvre and relate them to contemporary debates, asking how her notion of ambiguity speaks to decolonial freedom struggles; how myths inform our notions (...) of collective, national identities; how masculinity and its violence has reached new levels with the emergence of 'Incels'. These and other issues are central to this critical appraisal of Beauvoir's legacy, demonstrating the contemporary relevance of her thought as it diagnoses the present and looks toward change for a better future. This book will be of great interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students looking to engage with the political content of Simone de Beauvoir's work and the timely application of her ideas. (shrink)

This paper discusses the empirical, Application Programming Interface -based analysis of very large Facebook Pages. Looking in detail at the technical characteristics, conventions, and peculiarities of Facebook’s architecture and data interface, we argue that such technical fieldwork is essential to data-driven research, both as a crucial form of data critique and as a way to identify analytical opportunities. Using the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook Page, which hosted the activities of nearly 1.9 million users during the Egyptian Revolution and (...) beyond, as empirical example, we show how Facebook’s API raises important questions about data detail, completeness, consistency over time, and architectural complexity. We then outline an exploratory approach and a number of analytical techniques that take the API and its idiosyncrasies as a starting point for the concrete investigation of a large dataset. Our goal is to close the gap between Big Data research and research about Big Data by showing that the critical investigation of technicity is essential for empirical research and that attention to the particularities of empirical work can provide a deeper understanding of the various issues Big Data research is entangled with. (shrink)

In der niederländischen Kultur werden komplexe moralische Probleme oftmals mit einem pragmatischen und prozeduralen Verfahren statt mit einem prinzipiellen Zugang angegangen. Die Debatte um Entscheidungen am Lebensende, die dem Sterbehilfegesetz von 2002 vorausging, ist ein Beispiel für diese Praxis. Auch die Befassung der Niederlande mit der „terminalen Sedierung“, die als neue Phase in der Diskussion um Entscheidungen am Lebensende betrachtet werden kann, folgt den Prinzipien des „Poldermodells“. Gesellschaftliche und politische Gruppierungen kooperieren, um eine gemeinsame Lösung zu finden angesichts der Tatsache, (...) dass terminale Sedierung unterschiedliche Praktiken und entsprechend unterschiedliche moralische Implikationen beinhaltet. (shrink)

A systematic introduction suitable for readers who have little familiarity with logic. Provides numerous examples and complete proofs.

The study of complexity in chronic care is an emergent discipline that has not yet developed a consistent theoretical framework. Thinking in the field of complexity encompasses complexity science and complexity theories, which represent a convergence of different types of ideas and theories that focus on the interactions of individual parts that make up a complex system. In this context, an important distinction is to be made between "complex" and "complicated." If a system—despite the fact that it may consist of (...) a huge number of components— can be given a complete description in terms of its individual constituents, such a system is merely complicated. An example could be computers. In a complex system, on the .. (shrink)

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an incredibly sophisticated chatbot. Its capability is astonishing: as well as conversing with human interlocutors, it can answer questions about history, explain almost anything you might think to ask it, and write poetry. This level of achievement has provoked interest in questions about whether a chatbot might have something similar to human intelligence or even consciousness. Given that the function of a chatbot is to process linguistic input and produce linguistic output, we consider the (...) question whether a sophisticated chatbot might have inner speech. That is: Might it talk to itself, internally? We explored this via a conversation with ‘Playground’, a chatbot which is very similar to ChatGPT but more flexible in certain respects. We asked it questions which, plausibly, can only be answered if one first produces some inner speech. Here, we present our findings and discuss their philosophical significance. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt’s sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt’s use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt’s situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its temporal dimension. We make explicit (...) another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt’s neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt’s authority depends on a dichotomy between the private and the public sphere. This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt’s feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority in-between private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future, world and earth, and the private and public sphere. This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority. (shrink)

A scheme of analysis for separatism is proposed. Its purpose is twofold: to indicate the essential factors in a separatist process, and to explain the waves of active and « dead » separatist activity.The central idea is the distinction between three dimensions in the separatist process : conflict, mobilization and collective action. Both dimension on its own is determined by certain factors. Conflict depends on contradictions of identity and interest structure between people and nation. Mobilization is primarily a function of (...) the social, economic and political opportunities of the people as against the nation. Collective action is the result of the presence, strength and behaviour of the elite and social movement in people and nation.Evolution from one dimension to the next one depends upon the factors of the dimensions involved and on a) the policy of the nation and b) the societal changes caused by the modernization process.Finally one can explain inactive and active periods by verifying the presence or absence of these nine factors. It seems then that there are false and real « dead » periods, and that some separatist activity has a sound basis white other has not. (shrink)

Despite major institutional and political changes in the Belgian political system in the last 25 years, the electoral organization has been very stable.The adaptations of the electoral organization have even been less in the province of Brabant, although the politica! developments have caused there additional problems. Brabant's electoral constituencies contain a rather strange mixture of heterogeneous electorates : a constituency, which consists of the bilingual capital Brussels as welt as several Flemish communes, a unilingual Walloon constituency, a unilingual Flemish constituency. (...) The proposed solutions for Brabant's complex situation can be summarized into six alternative systems of electoral organization, concentrating either on the functioning of the system of provincial allotment, or on a radical redrawing of the boundaries of the electoral constituencies.The impact of the six alternatives on the seats distribution among the political parties is rather restricted. The shifts of seats inside the parties are more striking than between the parties. Alternatives IV and VI cause the largest reallocation of seats between the parties, whereas alternatives II, III and V result in only minor changes. (shrink)

RésuméDans ce dialogue, deux personnages principaux, Philopolis et Éleuthérios, proposent la position communautarienne et la position contractualiste libérale comme fondements de la théorie politique. Le débat se déroule, comme tout bon débat devrait lefaire, autour d'une bouteille de Chardonnay.

This essay aims to correct the widely-held view that Arendt is hostile to the body due to its physical needs. By focusing on two modes of corporeality that are distinguished by the production of bodily substances—the digestive body and the crying body—I argue that Arendt (1) deployed various notions of corporeality that thematize, in different ways, the uncontrollability our bodies; and (2) argues for the affirmation of this unmasterablity because it corresponds to the conditioned nature of human existence. Firstly, Arendt (...) criticized the Greek, narcissistic aspiration toward physical beauty, exemplified in the figure of Achilles, for its attempt to subjugate the digestive body to a preconceived end—a criticism that equally applies to Connolly’s plea for strategically altering our affects. Secondly, Arendt’s appreciation of Homer’s description of a crying Odysseus shows that the acknowledgment of events constitutive of one’s life consists in a publicly visible somatic reaction. (shrink)

This essay aims to correct the widely-held view that Arendt is hostile to the body due to its physical needs. By focusing on two modes of corporeality that are distinguished by the production of bodily substances—the digestive body and the crying body—I argue that Arendt deployed various notions of corporeality that thematize, in different ways, the uncontrollability our bodies; and argues for the affirmation of this unmasterablity because it corresponds to the conditioned nature of human existence. Firstly, Arendt criticized the (...) Greek, narcissistic aspiration toward physical beauty, exemplified in the figure of Achilles, for its attempt to subjugate the digestive body to a preconceived end—a criticism that equally applies to Connolly’s plea for strategically altering our affects. Secondly, Arendt’s appreciation of Homer’s description of a crying Odysseus shows that the acknowledgment of events constitutive of one’s life consists in a publicly visible somatic reaction. (shrink)

Recent advances in medical and information technologies, the availability of new types of medical data, the requirement of increasing numbers of study participants, as well as difficulties in recruitment and retention, all present serious problems for traditional models of specific and informed consent to medical research. However, these advances also enable novel ways to securely share and analyse data. This paper introduces one of these advances—blockchain technologies—and argues that they can be used to share medical data in a secure and (...) auditable fashion. In addition, some aspects of consent and data collection, as well as data access management and analysis, can be automated using blockchain-based smart contracts. This paper demonstrates how blockchain technologies can be used to further all three of the bioethical principles underlying consent requirements: the autonomy of patients, by giving them much greater control over their data; beneficence, by greatly facilitating medical research efficiency and by reducing biases and opportunities for errors; and justice, by enabling patients with rare or under-researched conditions to pseudonymously aggregate their data for analysis. Finally, we coin and describe the novel concept of prosent, by which we mean the blockchain-enabled ability of all stakeholders in the research process to pseudonymously and proactively consent to data release or exchange under specific conditions, such as trial completion. (shrink)

In the West, the practice of yoga is weighed down by years of cultural appropriation. But yoga is more than a one-hour fitness class aimed at flexibility. In Liberating Yoga, yoga teacher Harpinder Kaur Mann shows yogis a path to reclaim yoga from appropriation and recenter the ancient spiritual practice where it belongs.

Reading Feminist Theory: From Modernity to Postmodernity interweaves classical and contemporary writings from the social sciences and the humanities to represent feminist thought from the late eighteenth century to the present. Editors Susan Archer Mann and Ashly Suzanne Patterson pay close attention to the multiplicity and diversity of feminist voices, visions, and vantage points by race, class, gender, sexuality, and global location. Along with more conventional forms of theorizing, this anthology points to multiple sites of theory production--both inside and (...) outside of the academy--and includes personal narratives, poems, short stories, zines, and even music lyrics. Offering a truly global perspective, the book devotes three chapters and more than thirty readings to the topics of colonialism, imperialism and globalization. It also provides extensive coverage of third-wave feminism, poststructuralism, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and transnational feminisms. (shrink)

Priest, poet and broadcaster Rachel Mann believes the world is charged with a divine spark. She explains how in our encounters with what she terms 'the spectres of God', one can become at peace with limitation, precariousness, lack of certainty, and one's fragility and fractures - and at the same time find in divine fragility the hope of the world. Drawing on her own experiences, in three short chapters (on the body, on love, and on time) Mann explores (...) how God invites us, repeatedly, to live in a rich three-dimensional mystery that subverts the depressing flat-earth of modern life. (shrink)

Drugs used to provide improvement of cognitive functioning have been shown to be effective in healthy individuals. It is sometimes assumed that the use of these drugs constitutes cheating in an academic context. We examine whether this assumption is ethically sound. Beyond providing the most up-to-date discussion of modafinil use in an academic context, this contribution includes an overview of the safety of modafinil use in greater depth than previous studies addressing the issue of cheating. Secondly, we emphasize two crucial, (...) but hitherto nearly overlooked, nuances to the issues: the potential for modafinil to decrease inequality and disadvantage in academic settings, and the fact that how modafinil is used dramatically impacts its effects on health, coercion, fairness, authenticity and effort. Finally, we explicitly defend the position that there are no qualitatively morally relevant differences between modafinil use and other enhancement modalities; any such differences are in degree,... (shrink)

In a time of genetic editing, global warming, and a worldwide pandemic, the question of how freely science is and should be conducted is one that has significant practical consequences. Drawing on rigorous interdisciplinary methods, this book develops a model of scientific freedom as a human right.

Generative AI programs can produce high-quality written and visual content that may be used for good or ill. We argue that a credit–blame asymmetry arises for assigning responsibility for these outputs and discuss urgent ethical and policy implications focused on large-scale language models.

Different ideas of the normative relevance of autonomy can give rise to profoundly different action-guiding principles in healthcare. If autonomy is seen as a value rather than as a right, it can be argued that patients’ decisions should sometimes be overruled in order to protect or promote their own autonomy. We refer to this as paternalism in the name of autonomy. In this paper, we discuss different elements of autonomy (decision-making capacity, efficiency, and authenticity) and arguments in favor of paternalism (...) for the sake of autonomy that have been proposed in the bioethical debate. We argue that if autonomy is valuable, then paternalism for the sake of autonomy may be justified. However, policies allowing paternalism in the name of autonomy may be self-defeating. (shrink)

Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995) zählt nicht nur zu den wichtigsten Ethikern im 20. Jahrhundert. Vor allem entwirft er einen anderen Anfang der Ethik, die nicht auf der gesellschaftlichen Ebene oder als grosse Idee und Erzählung entsteht. Ethik entspringt vielmehr in der konkreten Zwischenmenschlichkeit, wenn man vom Anderen in die Verantwortung gerufen wird - und zwar durch die Verletzlichkeit seines nackten Gesichtes wie durch die Anrede. Die ethische Beziehung verdankt sich dabei nicht etwa der Gleichheit, der Nähe oder der Geschwisterlichkeit, sondern der (...) Andersheit des Anderen, seiner Ferne und vor allem seiner Fremdheit, die sich nicht hintergehen lassen. Damit gründet Lévinas die Gesellschaft nicht nur auf die Zwischenmenschlichkeit, sondern auch auf die Pluralität. So wenig wie die Ethik universelle Ansprüche erheben kann, lässt sich Gerechtigkeit als ein allgemeines Prinzip entwerfen. Vielmehr muss sie den Individuen in deren unendlicher Andersheit gerecht werden. In dieser Unendlichkeit blitzt im nackten Gesicht das Antlitz Gottes auf, denkt Lévinas aus der jüdischen Tradition heraus. Das lässt sich auch rein säkular verstehen, dass alle Menschen anders sind. Sie als Gleiche zu behandeln, unterwirft sie totalen politischen Ansprüchen, macht sie zu gehorsamen Untertanen. In Auseinandersetzung mit Sartre entwickelt Lévinas eine individualistische Ethik der Verantwortung, die jeden Menschen betrifft, indem sie aus der Zwischenmenschlichkeit heraus die Mündigkeit konstituiert. So verfolgt der Einzelne nicht primär seine Interessen, sondern übernimmt Verantwortung für den Anderen: Die Wende der Ethik im 20. Jahrhundert - von Sartre, de Beauvoir und Lacan inspiriert, von Derrida und Butler fortgeschrieben, bestehen zudem Parallelen zu Arendt und Foucault. (shrink)

A complete reconstruction of Lehmer’s ENIAC set-up for computing the exponents of p modulo two is given. This program served as an early test program for the ENIAC (1946). The reconstruction illustrates the difficulties of early programmers to find a way between a man operated and a machine operated computation. These difficulties concern both the content level (the algorithm) and the formal level (the logic of sequencing operations).

This study investigates the likelihood of director turnover following opportunistic insider selling. Given that opportunistic insider selling may be costly to a firm due to potential legal risk and firm legitimacy concerns, we hypothesize that directors engaging in this type of transactions have a higher likelihood of subsequently leaving the board. Using archival data of 11,409 directors in 2280 US firms from 2005 to 2014, univariate comparisons show that directors engaging in opportunistic insider selling are about 8% more likely to (...) exit their firms’ board compared to directors not engaging in this behavior. Furthermore, multivariate results show that the likelihood of director departure following opportunistic insider selling is higher for some directors but not all. Specifically, directors who are especially valuable to the board or costly to replace do not seem to experience elevated levels of turnover. Interestingly, this difference in director turnover is only observed in smaller firms. We find that in larger firms, the likelihood of director turnover following opportunistic insider selling does not depend on director characteristics. As such, results seem to suggest that boards do not homogeneously self-regulate in this context as some directors seem to be shielded from turnover following unethical behavior. (shrink)

The science underlying global warming, climate change, and the connections between these phenomena are reviewed. Projected future climate changes under various plausible scenarios of future human behavior are explored, as are the potential impacts of projected climate changes on society, ecosystems, and our environment. The economic, security, and ethical considerations relevant to determining the threat posed by climate change are subsequently assessed. The article then discusses the various means available for climate change mitigation, focusing on the relative strengths and weaknesses (...) of various societal alternatives including ‘geoengineering’ and transitioning to less carbon intensive energy sources. The article concludes with the author's views as to what steps might most profitably be taken to avert dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth's climate, and the ramifications if such steps are not taken. (shrink)

Both love and politics name relations, according to Arendt, in which a subject is constituted as a unique person. Following up on this suggestion, I explore how love gives rise to a conception of personhood that temporarily suspends the public judgments and social prejudices that reduce the other to their actions or to their social identity. I do so by tracing a similar movement in the various tropes of Arendt’s phenomenology of love: the retreat away from the collective world into (...) the intimacy of love, followed by the necessary return to the world and the end of love. This exploration casts a new—and surprisingly positive—light on some key notions in Arendt’s thought, such as the body, the will, and life. However, Arendt disregards that love, as De Beauvoir argued, requires a constant effort in restraining our tendency to reduce the lover to their social identity. (shrink)

This essay is part of a dossier on Cristina Lafont's book Democracy without Shortcuts.

ABSTRACT The influence by Walter Benjamin on Arendt’s notion of narrativity has been firmly established, but little research has been done to contextualize his influence. This paper fill this lacunae by showing how, like Benjamin, Arendt was concerned to deploy a form of writing history that ensures the individuality of its agents, but that as she articulated her notion of the public space, the redemptive, messianic elements in his historiography were replaced with a secular and political mode of remembrance. The (...) notion of the public space and the accompanying secularization of Benjamin’s redemptive history should not be understood as the result of a linear development, but rather as responses to contemporary political events, of which I focus on three: (1) her early writings on totalitarianism, in which she tries to come to terms with the Shoah; (2) her reflections on the Greek city state, in which she criticizes the instrumentalization of politics in post-war democracies such as West-Germany; and finally, (3) the court room as a space for storytelling and the contestation over the history of anti-Semitism during the Eichmann trial. (shrink)